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West and East Africa

Sep 07, 2017
By Jeremy Kirshbaum

Where Social Innovation Leads the Future

Paul throws the last of his peppers in the basket. Down the road, he sees the buyer’s van, takes out his phone, and enters a code. Immediately a text bounces back telling him the day’s market price for peppers. He strolls over to the van, knowing he’s going to get a fair price.

Abeka hears a noise, like someone is downstairs. She lives in a part of the city that can’t guarantee police will come if she calls. She takes out her phone and sends a blank text to a saved number. Within minutes, she hears voices, friends and neighbors, along with a security agency at her door checking to see if she’s okay.

These examples show how mobile data networks are driving change in West and East Africa. While the U.S., Europe, and Asia lead in hardware and supercomputing, in Africa’s “high-delta” (or “frontier”) markets, social innovation is what’s really driving progress. Long before everyday consumers used computers, people have been using their personal networks and hooking up with local micro-entrepreneurs and kiosk-operating business people to pioneer models for operating in this diverse landscape. The technology to distribute and share information simply amplifies these models of social innovation that have been evolving for decades. So as body area networks evolve in West and East Africa over the next decade, we can expect to see similar applications.

Many services in these areas are using personal data to innovate without relying on sophisticated sensor-based devices like health trackers. Instead, many people with feature phones in different locations simply enter text messages that are centrally accessed, aggregated, and analyzed to create and deliver a streamlined, localized service that people really need.

Although these services use nothing more than a text-enabled smartphone and a personal computer, creative use of the data gives them real impact. Most of the innovation involves process rather than product. And this social process innovation is usually built on a foundation of existing practices and relationships. As they evolve, and patterns in their application emerge, they’ll be packaged as services and experiences that the rest of the world can, and should, learn from.

Over the next decade, we can expect body area network technologies to shape services that address many different kinds of needs. But despite this diversity, applications will likely have two things in common: they’ll be more lightweight and more user-led than what we’ll see elsewhere.

West and East Africa will continue to import high technology from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, smartphones will replace feature phones, and bandwidth will increase to accommodate cloud computing. But the innovation that counts will largely be social and domestic. And the new services and the new service people in Africa will create could become models that the region exports to the rest of the world.

Most pieces in this issue focus on the human side of Human+Machine Symbiosis—how body area networks will augment the intentions and expressions that play out in our everyday lives. Some pieces illuminate the subtle, even invisible technologies that broker our outrageous level of connection—the machines that feed off our passively generated data and varying motivations. Together, they create a portrait of how and why we’ll express ourselves with this new body language in the next decade.